Many years ago, I engaged in a short dialogue with a former colleague who had told me that he was hired to “teach music.” I differed with him and insisted that we were hired to teach thinking, writing, study skills, and many other things that were ultimately applicable to all of life’s situations. I told him that music was merely our vehicle. I think it’s important for us professors to tackle problems of innumeracy and illogic wherever we can. Over the decades I’ve tried to get students to engage in thought sometimes to the detriment of the day’s musical-historical topic. Here are some examples.
1) To negate their tendency to use facile opposites (i.e., “Schubert is the complete opposite of Bach”) I ask the class, “What is the opposite of ‘yes’? . . . ‘up’? . . . ‘black’? . . . ‘salt’? . . . ‘cat’? . . . ‘ketchup’?” They begin to laugh and see absurdity in opposite-of thinking.
2) To deter them from using negative terms to describe music (i.e., “The piece does not have a singer” or “It is not a fugue.”) I tell them that while such statements might be true, the piece neither has nor is an electric guitar, a screwdriver, a fuzzy overgrowth, or a bad aftertaste. It’s best to describe what something is (contains) rather than by the potential infinity-minus-one of what it is not (does not contain).
3) To correct freshmen who think they will all get an A in the class with HS-effort I tell them, “U. S. News & World Report states that 63% of you freshman graduated in top quarter of your HS classes. My question is this: What percentage of you will finish in the top quarter of this music class?” There are always too many who answer “63%.” That’s a real eye-opener for incoming freshmen.
4) To give them a sense of connection to history I ask, “How many people here had ancestors who were alive during the 15th century?” About 10% of the hands go up. They often look at each other and mouth, “How the heck am I supposed to know?” I’m sorry to say that this one boggles many minds.
5) To get them to think about the mathematics of the division of the octave I ask them “How many pitches can there be in an octave, if the two pitches can be hypothetically represented by 100 Hz (a string length of 4 meters) and 200 Hz (2 meters)? How many if they can be represented by 200 Hz (2 meters) and 400 Hz (1 meter)?” When they get this wrong, I ask them how many numbers there are between x and 2x.
I’m wondering if any of you have general thought questions you use in your classes/discipline that you’d like to share.
I have a colleague at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School, Steve Powell, who often says, “I dislike when teachers say their job is to *cover* the material.” And on the subject of “off-the-syllabus” learning goals for our students, I have been most impressed with Jeanette Norden of the Vanderbuilt medical school who Ken Bain featured in his 2004 book What the Best College Teachers Do. She’s referenced on 22 pages of the book, but if you get to hear her speak in person about what she and Bain call “personal learning goals,” it’s even more moving. (The short version of the story is that she, as a professor of cell biology, has a unique way of teaching bedside manners that is one of the most moving experiences of the young physicians’ education.)